rvaluing its advantages, it was, I daresay, better on the whole as a
mental exercise, and greatly better in the provision which it made for
the future, that I should have to urge my way through the works of our
best writers in prose and verse--works which always made an impression
on the memory--than that I should have been engaged instead in picking
up odds and ends of information from loose essays, the hasty productions
of men too little vigorous, or too little at leisure, to impress upon
their writings the stamp of their own individuality. In quiet moonlight
nights I found it exceedingly pleasant to saunter all alone through the
Niddry woods. Moonlight gives to even leafless groves the charms of full
foliage, and conceals tameness of outline in a landscape. I found it
singularly agreeable, too, to listen, from a solitude so profound as
that which a short walk secured to me, to the distant bells of the city
ringing out, as the clock struck eight, the old curfew peal; and to
mark, from under the interlacing boughs of a long-arched vista, the
intermittent gleam of the Inchkeith light now brightening and now
fading, as the lanthorn revolved. In short, the winter passed not
unpleasantly away: I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed; and
my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I
found myself summoned one morning, by an officer-looking man, to pay
nearly three pounds--the last instalment which I owed, I was told, as
one of the heritors of the place, for its fine new church. I must
confess I was wicked enough to wish on this occasion that the property
on the Coal-hill had been included in the judgment on the Musical
Festival. But shortly after, not less to my astonishment than delight, I
was informed by Mr. Veitch that he had at length found a purchaser for
my house; and, after getting myself served heir to my father before the
Court of the Canongate, and paying a large arrear of feu-duty to that
venerable corporation, in which I had to recognise my feudal superior, I
got myself as surely dissevered from the Coal-hill as paper and
parchment could do it, and pocketed, in virtue of the transaction, a
balance of about fifty pounds. As nearly as I could calculate on what
the property had cost us, from first to last, the _composition_ which it
paid was one of about five shillings in the pound. And such was the
concluding passage in the history of a legacy which threatened for a
time to be the rui